This paper employs a firm-level collective bargaining dataset to investigate the effect of labor, as an important stakeholder of a firm, on debt contracting. I conjecture and provide evidence that firms with strong organized labor prefer bank loans to public bonds because, by communicating with...

This study investigates the empirical relationship between organized labor and audit fees. We find that audit fees are negatively related to the firm-level unionization rate — the higher the unionization rate, the lower the audit fees. We further observe that the unionized firms are less...

We examine the disclosure policies of non-unionized firms operating in unionized industries. We test the hypothesis that non-unionized firms have an incentive to disclose more information when their unionized rivals are engaged in labor renegotiations; that is, to weaken them. We find that...

In this study, we seek to understand whether soft information conveyed by contracting language found in private loan agreements is informative regarding borrower risk. We proxy for credit-risk-relevant soft information using Loughran and McDonald's (2011) uncertainty measure. We first examine...

We examine the commitment effect provided by mandatory disclosure and the information effect of voluntary disclosure on market illiquidity by exploring a regulatory change that allows smaller reporting companies to reduce the disclosure of certain information in their SEC filings. This regime...